The Arctic Drilling Ban: Much Ado About Nothing?

Outgoing President Barack Obama is about to invoke a 1953 law in a bid to protect the Arctic and Atlantic shelf of the United States from the claws of the oil and gas industry, but below the surface it may just be theoretical.

The Outer Continental Shelf Land Act, and more specifically its provision 12(a), has only been invoked a few times since the passing of the legislation and has always, until now, concerned discrete areas.

This time will be the first when the provision is invoked to protect such large regions of the country’s shelf and it’s looking like the invocation will be more of a symbolic gesture to the environmentalist lobby than anything of practical significance going forward.

On the face of it, Obama’s move would interfere with President-elect Donald Trump’s energy policy priorities, where drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic and Atlantic shelf features prominently, according to a memo from Thomas Pyle, Trump’s transition team energy policy leader.

While the Trump administration has been expected to open up more federal lands for drilling, the Pyle memo singled out the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, the Atlantic Ocean, the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA), and federal lands in the Western U.S.

Invoking provision 12(a) from the OCSLA could theoretically ban oil and gas licensing in these areas for an indefinite future. The powers to do this lay exclusively with the President and the decision cannot be rescinded automatically by a future president.

So, if Trump wants to remove the ban, he would have to go to court. The court, for its part, according to the Alaska director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Niel Lawrence, will hand matters over to Congress.

Congress, Republican-dominated as it is, will in turn revoke Obama’s invocation of the controversial provision, which quite simply states that the U.S. President can “from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the outer continental shelf.”

The court proceedings could take years, and this is what some observers see as problematic for the Trump administration. However, at the moment, the oil and gas industry is still weak and unable to commit the substantial amounts of investment needed for Arctic exploration. Big Oil already got burned in the Arctic, shelving projects and giving up licenses due to the high cost of the projects.

The Atlantic shelf is not as hostile but it will still take time for Big Oil and its smaller brothers to get back firmly on the cash flow positive path and be able to afford the investments. They need a few years for this and these few years nicely coincide with an earlier decision by Obama to suspend the sale of new exploration leases in the Arctic, the Atlantic, and the Pacific shelf from 2017 to 2022. Invoking provision 12(a) from the OCSLA, however, as Bloomberg points out, would explicitly put certain parts of the U.S. continental shelf “off limits” for the energy industry.

Chances are that the Trump administration would use all tools at its disposal to overcome this obstacle and will meanwhile seek ways around it, such as parts of the shelf that are under state jurisdiction. What’s more, given the right motivation, Congress could actually strike down the 12(a) provision altogether. Perhaps it’s time for the already very agitated environmentalist lobby to tread carefully lest it incurs greater damage by unduly antagonizing the new administration.

Trump will un-ban the Arctic ban. Trump will drill for oil and spill it all over the place, turning all those white polar bears into Black bears. No more polar bear crisis and we will have lots of oil for our 350 Chevy cars.

Go Speed Racer on Sun, 25th Dec 2016 6:48 am

The problem with drilling for arctic oil,
is the ice gets in the way. Fortunately we have melted
about half the ice, thanks to global warming.

To melt the other half, Trump can send Exxon supertankers to the arctic, equipped with high pressure pumps and igniters to spray the oil into a gigantic sheet of sooty fire, visible from outer space. As few as 100 tanker loads of
Arctic oil fires, and the arctic ice is all gone.

Then Trump can drill for oil right at the North Pole, in ice-free blue waters.

rockman on Sun, 25th Dec 2016 9:04 am

“Trump will un-ban the Arctic ban. Trump will drill for oil and spill it all over the place”. IOW identical to Presidernt Obama’s policies immediately after he took office 8 years ago. Time will tell if President-elect Trump maintains as many pro fossil fuel positions as President Obama held during his time in office. Even if he does I serious doubt we’ll see as much benefit as the fossil fuel industry saw under the current POTUS.

Go Speed Racer on Sun, 25th Dec 2016 1:13 pm

Hi Mr Rock Man,
It’s amazing Trump had enough verbal
propaganda going that both left and right
wing believes he was against oil and coal
production.

But in reality, he was digging and drilling
like crazy. Nobody thinks it though.

Go Speed Racer on Sun, 25th Dec 2016 1:15 pm

Oh, rats.
In above post, I am talking about Obama.
‘Trump’ is a typo. Why don’t we have the right to edit posts?

bug on Sun, 25th Dec 2016 8:12 pm

Rockman, your post is true. Do you say this also to people in the oil industry or only here? What do they say? In Louisiana if you say that to people offshore they say ” no way”. But I understand your point.